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9bb9e53
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I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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c506bb4
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When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b82fee7
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What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
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humor
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Margaret Atwood |
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862815a
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Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e2dddb9
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If you want what's in the package you should at least know how to get the string off, is what I say.
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Margaret Atwood |
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3d5db40
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The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
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nature
bears
wildlife
environment
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Margaret Atwood |
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9c31079
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This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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5195bb1
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I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in m..
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Margaret Atwood |
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36fb952
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The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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738d5de
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Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
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Margaret Atwood |
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894a03a
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We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us ho..
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snooping
the-blind-assassin
margaret-atwood
knowledge
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Margaret Atwood |
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7398530
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
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parable
fable
animals
humans
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Margaret Atwood |
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30caeee
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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.
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Margaret Atwood |
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8dc6b85
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The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Rhyme we are the maids the ones you killed the ones you failed we danced in air our bare feet twitched it was not fair with every goddess, queen, and bitch from there to here you scratched your itch we did much less than what you did you judged us bad you had the spear you had the word at your command we scrubbed the blood of our dead paramours from floors, from chairs from stairs, from doors, we knelt in wat..
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Margaret Atwood |
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5a26016
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we lived in the gaps between the stories
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Margaret Atwood |
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e9a0149
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I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
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humour
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Margaret Atwood |
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e06f24a
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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
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Margaret Atwood |
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0cff179
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I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.
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revenge
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Margaret Atwood |
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8f669c1
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We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is cr..
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Margaret Atwood |
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fa6b6e5
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at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything
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margaret atwood |
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0f05a97
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She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f58fd1f
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The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
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Margaret Atwood |
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e1961cb
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You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
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heaven
hell
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Margaret Atwood |
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756057b
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We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
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youth
wisdom
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Margaret Atwood |
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4ac28fb
|
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar...
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Margaret Atwood |
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91f96af
|
I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing.... I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.
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feminist
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Margaret Atwood |
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c0e13e3
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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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Margaret Atwood |
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d8101fc
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The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.
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Margaret Atwood |
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754ce19
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
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Margaret Atwood |
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21eb4e7
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So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
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Margaret Atwood |
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275021d
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But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
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Margaret Atwood |
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bacb539
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There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.
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Margaret Atwood |
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b3d45ba
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Red Fox The red fox crosses the ice intent on none of my business. It's winter and slim pickings. I stand in the bushy cemetery, pretending to watch birds, but really watching the fox who could care less. She pauses on the sheer glare of the pond. She knows I'm there, sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder. If I had a gun or dog or a raw heart, she'd smell it. She didn't get this smart for nothing. She's a lean vixen: I can see the ribs, the..
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burned
morning
margaret
red
house
fox
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Margaret Atwood |
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62488ce
|
And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession. Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly. What is everything? How did it go on? I beg your pardon, Sir? What did you do everyday? Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties. You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist? I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he..
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Margaret Atwood |
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ec2e2ac
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She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate somethi..
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marriage
selflessness
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Margaret Atwood |
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8661f5e
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I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe..
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disenfranchisement
coup-d-état
dystopia
womens-rights
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Margaret Atwood |
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299413a
|
The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighborhood children regard with derision and little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthens and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and roman..
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Margaret Atwood |
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32cfdf0
|
I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
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Margaret Atwood |
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a58e2c9
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Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked
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love
happy-endings
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Margaret Atwood |
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660cfc8
|
Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!
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Margaret Atwood |
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de3a493
|
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.
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Margaret Atwood |
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ef72975
|
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.
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time-travel
|
Margaret Atwood |
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4413f65
|
Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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Margaret Atwood |
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f5617db
|
How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.
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Margaret Atwood |